Life Without Father The Roleof the Paternal in the OpeningChapters of Huckleberry FinnHARRY GSEGAL

Critics have argued for generations about the failure of the ending ofHuckleberry Finn Ernest Hemingway began the debate by characterizingthe escapades at Silas Phelps farm as cheating his statement was soonfollowed by rhetorical volleys between Eliot Trilling Marx and otherswhose writings taken together form a miniature canon all their own1

While the ending has been variously defended on formal politicalaesthetic and moral grounds the very presence of a debate sustained formore than sixty years bears witness to the problem of those closingchapters Perhaps the most simple and ultimately unanswerable criticism

Harry G Segal is Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology Department of PsychologyHobart amp William Smith Colleges Geneva New York 14456-3397 USA

1 The series of essays about the ending of Huckleberry Finn have been referenced as agroup many times and may be found collected in several critical anthologies as well asin an appendix to Nortons annotated edition of the novel The following footnote isexcerpted from Mark Twain Realism and Huckleberry Finn in Louis Budd edNew Essays on Huckleberry Finn (Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1985)

The locus classicus of the stand-off between proponents of the humorous and seriousTwains is the famous debate about the ending beginning with Ernest Hemingwaysdeclaration that if you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen fromthe boys This is the real end The rest is just cheating Green Hills of Africa [NewYork Scribners 1935] p 22) Leo Marx argues that the burlesque ending betraysthe serious implications of the novel in Mr Eliot Mr Trilling and HuckleberryFinn American Scholar 22 (1953) 423-40 His targets on the basis of equally seriousreadings of the novel defend the ending See Lionel Trilling Huckleberry Finnin The Liberal Imagination (New York Scribners 1950) reprinted in Claude MSimpson ed Twentieth Century Interpretations of Huckleberry Finn (Englewood CliffsNJ) Prentice-Hall 1968) pp 107-8 James Cox to continue the availablepermutations and combinations defends the ending as part of his attack on seriousreadings of the book See Mark Twain The Fate of Humor (Princeton NJ PrincetonUniversity Press 1966) pp 175mdash82 for a general discussion of this debate seeJohn Reichert Making Sense of Literature (Chicago University of Chicago Pressbull977) PP- 191-203

Journal of American Studies 27 (1993) 1 19-53 copy 1993 Cambridge University Press

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20 Harry G Segal

of the ending is that the characters have grown inexplicably younger -that is they appear to behave in ways which disregard or undo theirearlier more maturing experiences It seems inconceivable that Huckwould go along so easily with Toms Count of Monte Cristo escapades afterwitnessing the Grangerfords feud just as Jims childlike acquiescence tothe escape plan cannot be reconciled with the wisdom and dignity he hadearlier shown as Hucks surrogate parent Despite the ingenuity of eventhe most brilliant supporters no reading can provide the characters in theclosing chapters with those psychological qualities they so palpably lackinstead supporters are left in the more awkward position of arguing thatthe failure of the ending constitutes an ironic success

This essay is not intended as a late entry into the long-standing debateRather than justifying or attacking the constricted conventionality of thenovels ending what follows is an explanation of why it occurs I beginwith this observation the superficiality of the books close does notabruptly follow an otherwise serious novel Critics have been so distractedby the unsatisfying ending that they have failed to note that HuckleberryFinn begins with a series of evocative dreamlike chapters which begins togive way to Twains more conventional parodies of Southern society longbefore Huck is taken for Tom by Aunt Polly This shift starts with thedeath of the Grangerfords and the arrival of the King and the Duke mdashfrom there the narrative unevenly divests itself of emotional resonancebefore culminating in the flat parodic tone of the final chapters Incontrast the most powerful passages of the novel may be found in theopening sequences where Huck awaits the arrival of his father escapeshim and rushes off in a blaze of ambivalence with his alternate father JimI believe the one is an avoidant answer to the other that is the difficultiesof the novels ending may be explained as a reaction to the depth of itsbeginning

The novels opening invokes a broad range of formal and psychologicalissues by its juxtaposition of character and novelist fiction and reality andultimately that of father and son Hucks competitive relationship withMark Twain his response to the sighting of paps corpse and hisflight to Judge Thatcher and Jim after recognizing paps footprints maybe read together as a depiction of a sons turbulent struggle againstintimacy with a threatening father I will argue that the process of writingthose beginning chapters often interrupted by writing blocks revealed toTwain consciously or unconsciously his disturbing issues of selfhoodand fatherhood which thus made inevitable the ultimate emptying of theclosing chapters In addition this relationship between Twain and the

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Life Without Father 11

writing of his text is itself a subject of the images and tropes of Hucksearly adventures as the opening chapters turn on struggles with thefather they form at the same time a self-conscious commentary on howthose struggles come into narrative being

Implicit in such an explanation of the novels structure is apsychodynamic model of the creative process which assumes that asauthors free associate characters and endings they gain momentaryglimpses of the unconscious issues represented in their fiction Sinceauthors are always readers of their emerging text they are continuouslyfaced with the choice of pursuing unconscious feelings and memoriesevoked by the actions and experience of their characters or of movingonto safer narrative ground by choosing to avoid the emotionally-laden material (They can do this by writing something psychologicallyneutral and thus often uninteresting or through the more neuroticcompromise of the writing block) I refer to analysis of this process as psychoformalism because it proposes that a literary work is itself arecord of the dialogic relationship between writer and text mdash betweenpsyche and form2

When Huckleberry Finn first addresses the readers in his beguiling andprovocative opening paragraph he immediately confounds their under-standing of who he is By saying he has read The Adventures of Tom Sawyerand has an opinion about its worth Finn suggests there is a fictional Huckwho should not be confused with the real one In fact he strongly impliesthat the fictional Huck is irrelevant

2 Although psychoformalism is not an established term the process to which it referswas first noted by Kenneth Burke who presented a technique he called metaphoricalpsycho-analysis along with an all-too-brief reading of Coleridges pattern of imageswhich served as an example in The Philosophy of Literary Form Studies in Symbolic Action(New York Vintage Books 1957) 62-76 See also his brilliant essay Psychology andForm in Counterstatement (Los Altos Hermes 1953) Other related theories includeErnst Kris classic work on creativity and ego regression Psychoanalytic Explorations inArt (New York Shocken Books 1964) Walter A Davis recent exposition of ahermeneutics of engagement in Inwardness and Existence Subjectivity inland HegelHeidegger Marx and Freud (Madison University of Wisconsin Press 1989) could beapplied to an authors dialectical relationship with his works and the undercited workof Albert Rothenberg who argues that creativity is essentially the mechanism ofdreamwork in reverse mdash see his The Emerging Goddess The Creative Process in Art Scienceamp Other Fields (Chicago Univ of Chicago Press 1979) A more extensive presentationof the psychoformal approach is in preparation see also Harry G Segal Mark Twainand the Power of the Paternal A Psychoformal Analysis unpublished dissertation EnglishDepartment Yale University 1990 pp 6mdash64 and Harry G Segal The Effort AfterMeaning Theoretical Clinical and Empirical Justifications for the Psychological Assessment ofNarrative unpublished dissertation Psychology Department University of Michigan1990

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22 Harry G Segal

You dont know about me without you have read a book by the name of TheAdventures of Tom Sawyer but that aint no matter3 (p i)

This opening sentence may be read in two ways It says that it doesntmatter if we have heard of Huck through Tom Sawyer or taken literallythat Tom Sawyer doesnt matter In either case Finns position on the othernovel could not be more clear knowing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer isnot a prerequisite for reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The emergence of Huck Finn the narrator has long been of interest tocritics Henry Nash Smith argued that the vernacular first personinadvertently led Twain to the creation of a tragic character while AlanTrachtenberg believes that Huck is trapped by his authors need to usehim as a comical figure4 Trachtenberg compares Hucks enslavement toTwains satiric intentions with Jims search for political freedom andinsists that the novels attack on society required that Huck remainundeveloped Hucks character is stunted by his creators need for himto serve as a technical device The same devices of irony which liberate thereader by instructing him about civilization and human nature also repressHuck by using him (p 969) The opposed readings of Trachtenberg andSmith form paradoxically a continuum of discontinuity namely thatHuck does deepen as a tragic character in the novels opening and isindeed transformed into a technical device long before the ending ofthe novel5 I propose that Hucks inconsistent voice at times deeply

3 Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Tom Sawyers Comrade (Berkeley TheUniversity of California press edition 1985)

4 Henry Nash Smith Mark Twain The Development of a Writer (Cambridge HarvardUniversity Press 1962) Alan Trachtenberg The Form of Freedom in Adventures ofHuckleberry Finn Southern Review 6 (1970) 954mdash71

5 More recently Andrew Jay Hoffman Twains Heroes Twains Worlds (PhiladelphiaUniversity of Pennsylvania Press 1988) claims that it is a fruitless critical task toseparate Twain from Huck The character we identify as our hero cannot be fullyseparated from the character who writes him the writing Huck cannot be fullyseparated from Mark Twain the reader cannot be fully separated from the book (31)Hoffman identifies the shifting tone and diction of the novel decides that this qualitynecessitates a holistic reading and insists that interpretations will falter if theyprivilege only one of the several clearly interdependent parts of the novel (p 39)Certainly the contrast of Smith and Trachtenbergs individually influential readingswould tend to support Hoffmans caution Huck both deepens as a tragic characteryet seems trapped by the satiric frame surrounding him However Hoffmans solutionis to step back from the novel and see it as an interplay of history heroism andtextuality (For him Huck is a traditional Raglanian hero who is ultimately powerlessat the novels end because he has been taken from mythology and placed in a realistic novel determined by society and the writing of history) His approach is an interesting

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Life Without Father 23

autonomous while at others mechanical and contrived has to do withhis role as narrator-heir to Mark Twain By turning the fictional Huck intoa fictionally real person who has read Tom Sawyer and hopes toimprove on its quality Twain unconsciously evoked the struggle betweenfather and son which dominates the tropes and language of the novelsopening Consider Hucks critique of Tom Sawyer

That book was made by Mr Mark Twain and he told the truth mainly Therewas things which he stretched but mainly he told the truth That is nothing Inever seen anybody but lied one time or another without it was Aunt Polly mdashToms Aunt Polly she is - and Mary and the Widow Douglas is all told aboutin that book mdash which is mostly a true book with some stretchers as I said before(p 1)

It is a powerful comma which separates he told the truth andmainly in the first sentence for its pause implies that Twain is a liarFinn may not condemn the famous author openly but his contempt isnever far from the surface He forgives Twain by saying I never seenanybody but lied one time or another yet he twice makes it clear thatTwain lied often in his narrative there were things which he stretchedIt was mostly a true book with some stretchers This opening offersa stark contrast to Tom Sawyer That novel began with an idyllic portraitof the Missouri town told by a benevolent narrator Finn begins his bookby attacking an established author

This playful competition between Finn and Twain contains anunconscious rivalry between father and son - a rivalry implicit in Hucksattempt to write a sequel One of the most problematic of artisticchallenges the sequel is a paradox because of the inherent demands on itsform A sequel must share some of the qualities of the first work withoutrepeating them extend the first work without violating its premises andit must be good or better In this way the sequel is an escalation of theusual struggle for rhetorical identity mdash instead of evolving from anestablished genre while retaining some of its features as all first texts dothe sequel has a specific antecedent for which it must be simultaneouslyself and other This can be seen in the opening stance of HuckleberryFinn A character born in work one (self) now introduces work two(other) and insists that work one is irrelevant Even the vocabulary of

extension of Robert Regans work but it effectively sidesteps the blurring of Twain andHuck by simply pointing out that it exists He does not attempt to explain why it is sonor does he address the psychological factors which may have compelled suchconfusion

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24 Marry G Segal

those first two paragraphs points to the rhetorical dilemma Finn says thatTwain told the truth mainly except for some stretchers Thequestion is which text is the main one and how can an authorstretch it into a sequel

Harold Bloom believes every creative act to be a battle betweenambitious son-poets and canonical father-texts yet there is an even closerrelation between the writing of a sequel and oedipal phase anxiety6 Astrong poet according to Bloom misreads earlier poems so as toachieve difference an author writing a sequel must achieve differences andresemblance Psychoanalytic accounts of adolescent development may beof use here7 The children who accommodate oedipal phase anxiety mostsuccessfully emerge neither as copies of their same-sex parents nor asopposite versions of them instead they enjoy resembling the parent insome ways while taking pride in the strengths which are theirs alone Thiserewhonian version of the healthy oedipal child found primarily intextbooks encompasses the broadest definition of the word success Forsuch a child the values and talents of her parents are not the only qualitiesshe internalizes mdash her success may resemble her familys but it will reflecther own culmination of insight and experience This paradox of originality- that something is original because it treats inherited material in anoriginal way mdash is reflected in the paradoxical meanings of success Derivedfrom the Latin sequor to follow success literally means something thatsucceeds something else while our contemporary understanding oi successimplies if not an original event at least one that is self-sufficient andenduring The essence of the oedipal struggle dwells in these opposedmeanings for the successful child is always a successor Since sequel isderived from sequor it signifies a form where the dialectical meanings ofsuccess are equally immanent To succeed is to follow to follow asuccessful work with another is to write a sequel

Since it is an expression of both meanings of success the sequel is alwaysabout the oedipal struggle Or put another way sequels are always aboutbeing a sequel To consider some examples Antony and Cleopatra is a

6 After beginning his career by applying the mystical I thou formulations of MartinBuber to romantic poetry Bloom then embarked on his long and sometimes obscureproject of positing a theory of literary succession and influence See of course TheAnxiety of Influence (London Oxford University Press 1975) and The Map of Misreading(New York Oxford University Press 1980)

7 See Anna Freuds major work The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense (New YorkInternational Universities Press 1946) as well as that of Peter Bios On Adolescence APsychoanalytic Interpretation (New York Free Press 1962) - both classic treatises on thesuccessful and unsuccessful outcome of the oedipal phase as first experienced bytoddlers and re-evoked during adolescence

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Life Without Father 25

sequel to Julius Caesar and one of its principal themes is Antonys roleinherited from his father Caesar of being Cleopatras lover In thesecond volume of Don Quixote Cervantes knight is no longer the foolishson struggling to join the long lost world of his chivalric fathers but hasgained instead an obsolete dignity and even at times paternal wisdom8

(It is also wonderfully an attack on the false sequels published after hisbrilliant first novel) The Odyssey begins with the plight of Telemachus andhis need to protect his mother from suitors who carry the projections ofhis own desires And perhaps the most dramatic example is the NewTestament which as an appendix to the Old Testament describes Christsoedipal relationship with God - Jesus both Son and Father embodies theHebrew laws yet irrevocably changes them So Finns opening attack onMark Twain should not be a surprise it is an inspired announcement thata sequel has begun9

The tension between first text and sequel Huck Finn and Mark Twainis nowhere more clear than in the content of Hucks accusation he callsMark Twain a liar By doing so he implies that his novel will be true whilethe last novel was false - yet his readers soon learn that Huckleberry Finnis perhaps the most accomplished liar in American literature This is anevocative contradiction The accusation suggests that this book willcorrect Tom Sawyer and reveal those characters as they truly are Howeverthe ironic narrator who claims to tell the truth while admitting that he tellsfalsehoods complicates his relationship with the reader Like Iago who liesto the audience in his asides Finns compromised reliability leaves his textopen to post-structuralist inquiries are there fictional truths are theretruthful fictions Finally the taste for lying which Huck shares withTwain also returns us to the nature of the sequel for here the son activelydenies his obvious resemblance to the father

A sequel is ultimately a response and not an initial statement if onlyby virtue of its successor status If a first novel is defensively optimisticand happy a place where mothers adopt stray boys and ideal fathers makethem their proteges then one can expect a second novel featuring thesame landscape to undo those defenses in the services of difference mdash itmay even present a world without kind mothers where ideal fathers arepowerless While this paradigm is necessarily reductive it provides a way

8 See Rene Girards perceptive argument on the roles of triangulation and desire in DonQuixote in Deceit Desire and the Novel (Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press

9 What makes Finns novel rare however is that it is an especially strong sequel Likethe New Testament read by more people than the Old Testament The Adventures ofHuckleberry Finn is no longer a sequel For most readers it is the first text

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26 Harry G Segal

into Huckleberry Finn To start this search for difference the St Petersburgof Hucks novel is not the same one found in The Adventures of Tom SawyerThe ultimately benevolent town in the first novel conveyed throughliterary cliches has been replaced by a less cohesive less protective oneIts citizens may bear the same names but they and their society aredifferent The saviour-mother of the first book the Widow Douglas isnow a neglectful woman who grumbles over her meals and gives chargeof Huckleberry over to her insensitive sister Miss Watson Tom Sawyerwho showed only moments of arrogance in the earlier text is now openlycontemptuous of Hucks ignorance and calls him a numskull Thesechanges prove false the suggestion implicit in the ending of Tom Sawyerthat society would save Huck This St Petersburg is not the nostalgicvision of the sleepy antebellum South capable of rescuing the child in itsreaders it is instead a sinister place where violence and isolation are everpresent

I set down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something cheerful butit warnt no use I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead The stars wasshining and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful and I heard anowl away off who-whooing about somebody that was dead and a whippowilland a dog crying about somebody that was going to die and the wind was tryingto whisper something to me and I couldnt make out what it wasThen awayout in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wantsto tell about something thats on its mind and cant make itself understood andso cant rest easy in the grave and has to go about that way every night grieving(P-4)

This oft-quoted passage is the novels first chapters in miniature for itcaptures Hucks surreal isolation Like moments in an unsettling dreamthe boy hears vague messages of death but cannot answer back Huck ishere and throughout a witness to loss and his testimony of the night castshis readers as fellow witnesses For just as Huck cannot answer the ghostwho cant make itself understood neither can we locked on our sideof the text answer Huck

Not only is the tone and location of this sequel different from its firsttext it has a new psychological focus In Tom Sawyer Huckleberry Finnescorts Tom to nocturnal landscapes where father corpses are buried andexhumed and where digging underground leads momentarily tounconscious wishes and fears Those excursions were a side effect ofToms gathering success growing more powerful meant occasionalconfrontations with his urge to beat the father and his fear of paternalreprisal In this work the nocturnal landscape and confrontation with

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Life Without Father 27

fathers are primary events they overwhelm and dominate the daylitworld Thus an understanding of the nature of the sequel reveals thepsychoformal pressures on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn TomSawyers Comrade As a sequel it must be about oedipal struggle as asequel to Tom Sawyer a work which moved away from unconscious issuesthis novel must move towards them specifically Huck must face thatfather in the graveyard from whom Tom Sawyer escaped to the idealizedfigure of Judge Thatcher While these reversals have enormousconsequences their aggregate effect is this since Huck Finn held back theworld of the unconscious in Tom Sawyer his sequel will dwell there10

The unconscious of the novel is nowhere more apparent than whenHuck first mentions his biological father Ironically (or perhapspredictably) this first news of pap is an exaggerated account of his deathand yet paps effect on his son and on the text is so powerful that even afalse report about him intensifies the mood and structure of the earlychapters

Well about this time he was found in the river drowned about twelve mile abovetown They judged it was him anyway said this drowned man was just his sizeand was ragged and had uncommon long hair - which was all like pap - but theycouldnt make nothing out of the face at all They said he was floating on his backin the water They took him and buried him on the bank But I warntcomfortable for long because I happened to think of something I knowedmighty well that a drownded man wont float on his back but on his face So Iknowed then that this warnt pap but a woman dressed up in a mans clothes(P- J4)

An analysis of this passage reveals paps tremendous impact for Hucksexplanation raises more questions than it answers If the floating corpsewas a woman why didnt anyone say so Why does Huck so calmlypresent his theory without wondering why a woman would be dressed inmans clothes But Hucks speculation is most intriguing howeverbecause it foreshadows his return trip to St Petersburg dressed as a girlin a dress which he and Jim find next to the dead body of pap Thiscircling of the future into the present as well as a face that cannot berecognized and a father who may be a woman evoke the consciousnessof dreaming where events and qualities are layered with echoes of

10 To translate this idea into psychoanalytic terms one could think of Huck Finn as thelatent meaning of the manifest content of Tom Sawyer See also Wayne Fields Whenthe Fences are Down Language and Order in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer andHuckleberry Finn Journal of American Studies 24 (1990) 3 369-386 who argues thatthe world of Tom is one characterized by order and limits while in Hucks narrativeorder is consistently undermined

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28 Harry G Segal

alternate events and qualities When critics have described Tom Sawyer asa dream of boyhood they mean literary dreaminess mdash a nostalgic idealizedlandscape descended from Romance True to the nature of the sequelwhich must be similar and different from its first text the landscape ofHuckleberry Finn is dreamlike in another way it resembles psychologicaldreams where identity impulse and action are neither fixed nor separate11

The false report of paps death may be a good example of a passageinformed by dream logic (or primary process thinking) but it is one of alimited number The dreamscape is an unstable part of this novel oneclearly difficult to sustain While the last chapters of Huckleberry Finn failbecause of the utter lack of unconscious depth so present in the beginningchapters even the dreamscape of the novels opening ebbs and flows likean unconscious tide drawn to fulfill the simile by the waxing and waningof Hucks father This tentative yet repercussive interchange between thenovels reality and its psychological issues may best be understood byanalyzing the sequence of events following the first signs of paps return

There was an inch of snow on the ground and I seen somebodys tracks Theyhad come up from the quarry and stood around the stile a while and then wenton around the garden fence It was funny they hadnt come in after standingaround so I couldnt make it out It was very curious somehow I didnt noticeanything at first but next I did There was a cross in the left boot-heel with bignails to keep off the devil (p 19)

By not sharing with the reader until several scenes later what that cross inthe left boot heel meant mdash namely that the tracks belong to his father mdashHucks description adds suspense to the narrative Aside from piquing thereaders interest omitting the name of the early morning stalker also blurshis identity and allows his tracks to evoke a host of possibilities Considerthe second sentence they had come up from the quarry Huckspersistent use of the third person plural only emphasizes the multiplereferents of the pronoun It suggests that there are many fathers whocould be circling his house and in a narrative where Huck adopts a seriesof men to father him his use of they takes on a proleptic qualityBesides foreshadowing events in the narrative this passage also harkens

11 A beautiful description of this kind of awareness may be found in an early chapter ofThe Magic Mountain As his grandfather once again shows Hans Castorp the familysbaptismal bowl and recounts the young boys christening a familiar feeling pervadedthe child a strange dreamy troubling sense of change in the midst of duration oftime as both flowing and persisting of recurrence in continuity mdash these were sensationshe had felt before on the like occasion and both expected and longed for againwhenever the heirloom was displayed Thomas Mann The Magic Mountain transH T Lowe-Porter (New York Knopf 1949) 25

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Life Without Father 29

back to the false report of paps death That they have come up fromthe quarry sounds as though people have come up from underground orup from the grave while the crossing of the fence suggests a return fromthe underworld Within the passage therefore the wish that his fatherwere dead is combined with the wish that he return

Huck immediately responds to the sighting of his fathers footprints byrushing to Judge Thatcher the ideal father of Tom Sawyer for help In anexchange noted by one critic for its ambiguous treatment of ThatcherHuck tries to give him his money12

He saysWell Im puzzled Is something the matterPlease take it says I and dont ask me nothing mdash then I wont have to

tell no liesHe studied a while and then he says

Oho-o I think I see You want to sell all your property to me mdash not giveit Thats the correct idea

Then he wrote something on a piece of paper and read it over and saysThere mdash you see it says for a consideration That means I have bought it

of you and paid you for it Heres a dollar for you Now you sign it (pp 19mdash20)

A close look at this scene shows that Huck has not come to the Judge forhelp Quite to the contrary instead of telling him what happened Huckremains silent and insists that Thatcher take his gold Although Hucknever tells the reader why he does this one plausible explanation is thathe wishes to keep the money and assumes that his father will have a moredifficult time getting it away from an adult than from a child If so byusing him as an obstacle the boy has set up the Judge as effectively as anyprofessional con man And while his entrapment of Thatcher may seemunwarranted the Judges reaction appears to justify Hucks expectationsof him Like all good cons success depends upon the greed of the markAlthough he returns Hucks money at the end of the novel there is nosuggestion in the present passage that Thatcher intends to do so Hestudied a while Huck writes and then says Oho-o You want to sellall your property to me not give it The King or the Duke would havebeen worthy of studying for a moment before coming up with a12 Robert Regan in his excellent book on Mark Twain is the only critic I have found who

questions the integrity of Judge Thatcher in this scene Regan sees a hint ofhypocrisy in Thatcher even in Tom Sawyer and argues that the Judges redemptive actof returning Hucks money at the end of the novel takes place several years andseveral hundred pages after the scene in which [he] gives Huck a dollar in return forhis fortune He goes on to speculate Perhaps the author had simply forgot the seedof doubt about the Judges honesty he had planted so long before Robert ReganUnpromising Heroes (Berkeley University of California Press 1966) 135

2 AMS 27

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30 Harry G Segal

discrimination as sophistical as that between giving away cash and sellingit for a dollar (Thats the correct idea) From a man looked up to as agod by the townspeople in Tom Sawyer to a lawyer contemplating takingmoney from a child in Huckleberry Finn Thatcher sounds like a con mantoo In this sequel ideal fathers are no longer ideal

Hucks encounter with paternal figures does not stop with the Judgefor in the very next scene he seeks out a third and more welcoming fatherhe goes to Jim with the hope that Jims hairball taken from the fourthstomach of an ox might tell him something about pap After trying toget it to roll on the floor Jim announces that the hairball sometimeswouldnt talk without money

I told him I had an old slick counterfeit quarter that warnt no good because thebrass showed through the silver a little and it wouldnt pass nohow even if thebrass didnt show because it was so slick it felt greasy and so that it would tellon it every time (I reckoned I wouldnt say nothing about the dollar I got fromthe judge) I said it was pretty bad money but maybe the hairball would take itbecause maybe it wouldnt know the difference Jim smelt it and bit it andrubbed it and said he would manage so the hairball would think it was good Hesaid he would split open a raw Irish potato and stick the quarter in between andkeep it there all night and next morning you couldnt see no brass and itwouldnt feel greasy no more and so anybody in town would take it in a minutelet alone a hairball (p 21)

In its structure this scene is literally a new version of Hucks exchangewith Judge Thatcher but one sporting several important changes In bothinstances the boy has gone to an older man for help and the man hascharged him for services rendered Yet in the second version man andboy have found more trustworthy partners Huck apparently feelscomfortable enough to confide in Jim the signs of paps imminent arrivaljust as Jim generously lowers his price and accepts the false quarter forpayment (Of course the exchange is not without an undertone ofstruggle Jim still claims the hairball needs money while Huckreckoned he wouldnt say anything about the dollar given him by theJudge)

As a new version of the Thatcher meeting Hucks scene with Jimserves as a reading of the earlier one The central image of the oldcounterfeit quarter that warnt no good may be understood asrepresenting the counterfeit transaction with the Judge (and bymetonymy the coming relationship with pap) As the better father Jimsremedy for the brass quarter is both magical and suggestive the rawIrish potato will be split open and the quarter placed between the

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Life Without Father 31

two halves and kept there all night This process a kind of Missourialchemy strongly implies that father relationships so fraught with fearand loathing can be changed into something of value That is a morepeaceful intimacy mdash such as floating down the Mississippi on a raft mdash maytransform something counterfeit and violent into something real Sucha transformation needs a magic spell or to decode the metaphor itrequires the unique range of literary form which can contain and generatea progressively redemptive series of fathers

Still solving the problem of the bad father is not as simple as merelymoving from pap to Thatcher to Jim If the cure for the quarter isexamined more closely it seems to cause as many problems as it is meantto solve The potato is cut into two pieces and then put back togethersuggesting a primitive scheme of identity where self and other are aspectsof each other where two selves forming a symbiotic whole are constantlysplit apart and rejoined (This neatly predicts Hucks life with pap in thecabin) It would appear then that for this text getting close to a goodfather is terrifying because it evokes among other deep memories andwishes the earlier violent symbiosis This explains why the lovingrelationship between Huck and Jim forever strained by Hucks socialguilt is continually interrupted by arbitrary twists in the plot as well asby long writing blocks suffered by Mark Twain Even the magic spellitself betrays the possibility of a real reconciliation with the father becausethe cure is ultimately cosmetic After a night between the pieces of potatothe quarter will still be bad money - it will only seem genuine

Since the sighting of the footprints the meeting with Thatcher and theconference with Jim are all about the psychological consequences of thefathers approach these scenes may also be read as a commentary onHucks relationship with Mark Twain Finn begins his narrative after allby challenging Twain and the nature of the sequel oedipal in formmakes a compelling case for considering Twain as an aspect of pap

There was an inch of snow on the ground and I seen somebodys tracks Theyhad come up from the quarry and stood around the stile a while and then wenton around the garden fence It was funny they hadnt come in after standingaround so I couldnt make it out

Twain is present in a generalized way through the topology of thispassage It suggests a diagram of the creative process with the idea orinspiration coming up from the imagination only to be shaped bystile and narrative limits represented by the garden fences (There iseven a lingering pun in quarry considering that Twain mined his

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32 Harry G Segal

childhood for his fiction13) To bring the creator directly into thismetaphor of his writing process let us assume that it is Twain himselfwho has come up from the quarry who has encountered Hucks stileand who has circled the house without entering Although Huck puz2lesover why they hadnt come in the answer may not be as mysterious ashe thinks If Twain had come into the house then Huck would not haveremained the narrator of Huckleberry Finn Instead the unentered houserepresents the otherness of the narrative while its closed doorsemphasize the distance between fiction and its author The tracks in thesnow which showed that the man stood around for a long timeforeshadow the long eight years Twain will struggle to finish thisdisturbing narrative that he often tried to pigeonhole and oncethreatened to burn The tracks show him circling his house of fiction andseeing within alien figurations which had emerged somehow from thedark passages of his quarry

This circling of Huck by Twain representing the inherent struggle ofwriting a sequel is also figured within Jims alchemical treatment ofHucks counterfeit quarter This bad money that wouldnt passnohow because it was so slick it felt greasy and so that it would tell onit every time stands for the dubious second text that must somehow passfor the original Compromised by a first text written in an irretrievableconfluence of imagination and recollection and which may now seemforeign to him despite its faintly familiar strength the author must coina new text in the image of the older one Cutting the potato in twosymbolizes Twains solution there will be a second narrator and a set offathers to replace Judge Thatcher and a new story that will at least in itsopening chapters reveal the depths of unconscious feelings merely hintedat in the dark underground moments of Tom Sawyer Keep that quarterthere all night after a night of dreaming perhaps and anybody intown would take it in a minute

The psychological price exacted for launching an alter ego narratorwho claims as textual material narrative ground repressed in your firstnovel is the rich but unsettled disorganization of poorly defended feelingsso vividly represented by the floating female body of pap and hissubsequent resurrection As the historic controversy over the Phelps Farmescape sequence suggests the unconscious depth claimed by the new

13 I am grateful to John Seeleye for his comments as a reviewer on this manuscript Hesuggests that the pun on quarry may be a triple pun Twain wrote much of Huck Finnwhile staying at Quarry Farm near Elmira - a place he associated with creativity I amalso grateful for the comments of Eric Sundquist another reviewer

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Life Without Father 3 3

author Huck Finn is only sustained until the old author threatenedfinally by the reflection of his own aggression and longing for the fatherhastens to restore to his novel the parodies satires and other literarydevices which served him so well as a journalist and which ultimately takefrom Huckleberry Finn the temporary majesty of its opening chapters Theending represents a desperate attempt to return to The Adventures of TomSawyer to evade feelings conjured by the writing of its sequel theclaustrophobic quality and emotional vacancy of the Phelps Farm escapesequence suggests Twain succeeded in making his own escape

After leaving Jims consultation with the hairball Huck walks homeonly to find his father waiting in his bedroom It is not long after that papwins custody of him sues Thatcher for the money and takes Huck awayto a small cabin where he regularly beats him The description of life inthat cabin is perhaps the most powerful and dreamlike scene in the novelbecause it is the final and most prolonged encounter between son andfather Yet as we have seen before it happens the tropes images andevents of the narrative seem preoccupied with it it is as if the time withpap in the cabin left a proleptic impression on the narrative leading up toit The coming relationship with pap exerts this influence because lifewithout father is impossible for Huckleberry Finn both Huck and hisnarrative are constituted by the race from and inevitable attraction to thepaternal This may be glimpsed nowhere more keenly than in this last lookat Hucks discovering of his fathers footprints

I didnt notice anything at first but next I did There was a cross in the left boot-heel with big nails to keep off the devil

The novels collision of form and psychological force is so monolithic thatits repercussions threaten to break the very frame of the text - for thecross placed in paps left boot-heel designed to keep off the devilshows that even the father of the narrative is running from a father

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